The Problem with Comparing Syrian and Jewish Refugees

November 20, 2015

The heated
anti-immigrant talk from many European
and American
politicians in the aftermath of the Paris attacks has led those of us who find
that response abhorrent to seek out strategies of our own. Things like, for
example, reminding that the attackers were
European. But the pro-refugee argument that seems to have stuck is the
Holocaust analogy, which goes as follows: On the eve of the Holocaust, Americans held unfavorable opinions about Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany
and elsewhere in Europe, which, as the punditry goes, is like Republican rhetoric on
immigration.

On a certain
level I get it. As a Jew, I can’t see news about the current refugee crisis
without thinking about the Jews who were turned away from the United States
when fleeing Nazi Germany. Not all Jews, of course, have had this reaction, but
I’m hardlyalone.
It’s not a perfect analogy—are they ever?—but the
essential point holds: People fleeing oppression should not be conflated
with their oppressors, and are actually uniquely
helpless once that sort of rhetoric is underway. But as I watched the analogy
go viral (see also
Ishaan Tharoor’s recent follow-up)
in the mainstream
press, I began to
feel that famous sense of Jewish unease. The current Syrian refugee crisis—and
the largely xenophobic response—is really not about Jews. The analogy puts Jews at the center of the symbolic
action, which is really the last place we need to be. Anti-Semitism is, at its
core, the belief that everything bad on this planet (and perhaps on others as
well) happens because of Jewish misdeeds. It’s not so much about
straightforwardly hating Jews as it is about wildly overestimating Jews’
influence. As such, anti-Semitism rests on a broader, if not necessarily
Jew-hating, conviction, namely that Jews are simply central.

As is quite clear at this
point, ISIS and other likeminded extremist groups alreadyuse Jews as a symbol of the West. Or,
to put this in more urgent, less abstract terms: A Jewish teacher was stabbed
in France a few days ago, reportedly by someone in an Islamic State shirt. Swedish
Jews are under
threat as well. From the extremist view of things, this is totally about
Jews—symbolic Jews, yes, but also the real ones who find themselves in the
wrong place at the wrong time.

The use of
Jews—or, rather, The Jews—to make points that are at most tangentially related
to Jews has a long tradition in France, with Jews representing the secular
Republic to its friends and foes alike. And as the refugee analogy suggests,
Jewish-analogizing is hardly limited to reactionaries, or to xenophobic causes.
The progressive left—and by this I mean the Jew-friendly branch of
it—analogizes as well. But I
always hesitate when I see my favorite thinkers on civil-rights issues not
specifically related to Jews (Dan Savage on gayrights,
Ta-Nehisi Coates on African American rights) using Jews to make their points, whether in a casual,
no-one-would-say-this-about-the-Jews way, or with a more sophisticated
historical analogy. And it’s not—let me make this abundantly clear—that
Jewish-analogizing is anti-Semitic.
It’s not! Often enough, a particular analogy will perfectly well serve some
greater—urgent, even—point. The problem is that in the aggregate, this repeated
centering of Jews, these repeated rhetorical reminders of Jews, no matter what
the subject at hand, have a way of further installing Jews in the position of
eternal symbol. And it’s not so great at the symbolic center. Being there means
attracting the fury not just of those who straightforwardly hate Jews, but also
that of anyone with any opinion on just about any contentious issue. Which is a
lot to bear.

While the
European-Jews-and-Syrian-refugees analogy itself is sound, there is something
that doesn’t sit right about the reasons it keeps getting made outside a
Jewish-specific context. Consider the assumption that lies at the heart of the comparison:
No one today would think to advocate for turning away Jews, right? To which I
feel compelled to ask: Are we so sure? Nodding along to the analogy means, in a
sense, agreeing that anti-Semitism is over, and that it’s simply been replaced
by anti-Muslim bigotry. Which, no—there’s plenty of bigotry to go around! While
it’s true that the political right these days in the U.S., embraces a certain
enemy-of-my-enemy philo-Semitism (see especially MikeHuckabee), anti-Semitism has hardlydisappeared. It’s not so much Jews as Jewish Holocaust victims who are sacrosanct. The
line of progressive argument—whether on Syrian refugees or other topics—that’s
about insisting that no one would ever dare say whatever it is about Jews has a way of missing the fact that
people actually do dare say all kinds of things about Jews, all the time.

So: Is the point
that Syrian refugees would, in a couple generations, become undifferentiated
white people, and perhaps create a clever sitcom or two? Or is it that “Nazis
are bad” is a truth that most people (not just Jews!) can get behind? Or maybe
the analogy is about saying that today’s xenophobes are also Judeophiles,
which, while true in some partial, tenuous sense (see, again, Huckabee),
ignores that thing, not unheard-of in the West, where white Christian sorts
hate all minorities. As for whether the analogy has the potential to change the
mind of anyone who wouldn’t have spontaneously come up with this connection…
there I have my doubts.

There are very
few of us Jews in the world. We neither caused the world’s problems nor hold
the answers. So if we’re not central to whichever issue of the day—and
typically, we’re not—maybe consider leaving us, as an entity, out of it.